taneous actions are involved in the great one, which, without such, could itself never have had existence.

Though, as our readers have already seen, we have estimated Mr. Martin's power of physiognomical expression at a somewhat humble rate, there is, we must now add, another species of expression, in which he stands almost unrivalled. Its influence has been felt by all who have received pleasure from his works; but by very few has the secret of its strength been perceived. This expression it is, by which every part of a picture is made, as it were, in one grand harmony to sound the chord of that emotion which is to it as the soul by which it lives :-it is the convergence of every ray towards the one burning point ;-the bowing down of every subject—part before the throne of the one ruling sentiment. And in this fine concord resides the real unity of the picture, and not in its relative fewness or multitude of parts. A disciplined army beneath one chief is itself but one, though consisting of thousands; and a painting may possess its integrity unbroken, though out of its fractional parts might be formed a thousand pictures. We must illustrate our meaning by referring to one of Mr. Martin's works; and shall select that which, like a sudden sunshine, burst upon the unexpecting public-his Feast of Belshazzar.

The story here told is of a supernatural visitation-of an immediate act of the hand of God working visibly to the human eye. A wicked and arrogant king sits with his thousand lords, his wives, and his concubines, at the feast, and impiously profanes the vessels which had been consecrated to the worship of the One God; but the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone, they praise and worship. The measure of his guilt is full; and the punishment must follow. But, in the face of all has the crime been perpetrated, and before the eyes of all must his doom be announced. In the height of their sacrilegious banquet, a hand—an armless hand-writes upon the wall the irrevocable words; and, having written them, disappears. Then is the king's countenance changed, and his thoughts trouble him, so that the joints of his loins are unloosed, and his knees smite one against another. The astrologers and the soothsayers strive in vain to read the unknown characters; but the prophet of God appears, and interprets them to the king. This interpretation is almost immediately verified; for, "in that night, is Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. This is the subject of the picture, a theme grand, awful and difficult. It is not a subject for a fine colourist merely, or an expert draughtsman, but for a poet who can embody his conceptions in form and colour.

What, then, is the great sentiment impressed by such a subject? and what is it, consequently, that the painter has to accomplish? To answer this, we again ask,-what must have been the prevailing sentiment of the spectators in the actual scene? Various emotions might, at moments, mingle in various bosoms: the king might mourn his downfall,—the queen might lament her son,-the thousand lords might tremble for their power and their riches:-but these, and every other possible feeling, must be in subjection to the overwhelming awe arising from a belief in the immediate presence of an offended and threatening God. This, then, is the great sentiment; and this it is which the painter must attempt to infuse into his picture; every thing in it must have relation to this; all must be solemn, sublime, mysterious, and awful. He has to represent a scene in which the Deity himself, not all invisibly working, is an immediate agent but how

is this to be effected? The "fingers of a man's hand, writing upon the wall," were, to the actual spectators, sufficient to attest the supernatural presence; but, as so many preceding painters have shown, in a picture, the motionless hand is merely ridiculous. It looks too often like the fragment of a statue, or like an inflated glove, or like any thing rather than the living, but not human, hand, whose possessor, though viewless, was felt to be present. It was in the actual motion of this bodiless hand, leaving behind it the unknown characters, that the token of a supernatural agency was acknowledged. The moveless hand merely, or the written letters merely, would have been thought the trick of an impudent impostor; but the armless hand, moving before their eyes, was indeed a terrible and unearthly spectacle. But the pictured hand cannot move; and the painter has therefore apparently nothing left but an unhappy choice betwixt the dead unmoving fingers and the characters ready-written out,an alternative which seems to promise little success, as is shown in the labours of other artists. We do not mean to say that The Feast of Belshazzar has not been admirably painted by others, but that, before the present work, there has not been, as far as our knowledge extends, any thing that could pretend to be even the faintest shadowing forth of the supernatural denunciation from God against the king of Babylon. Mr. Martin was the first to perceive, that it was not in the bodiless hand merely, or in the unknown letters, that the mystery and the terror consisted, but in the sense of a present supernatural power. To awaken this sentiment was, then, his first great object; and he perceived that, though he could not give to the hand a supernatural motion, he might yet impart to the already written letters a character of mystery and terror, which would equally excite the sense of a supernatural presence. This he has triumphantly accomplished, by giving them vastness of size, and a splendour, as though the hand that had traced them had guided the lightning over the wall, and left its yet burning fires imprinted there. Having accomplished this, -having raised emotion of a character so awful and sublime,-it was necessary that all the accompaniments of the scene should likewise sustain a character of grandeur and awful magnificence. Letters written as with lightning would have been ill-matched with a mean and familiarlooking chamber,-with commonplace decorations, or such objects as are every day beheld around us. To the spectators of the actual event, the effect might have been of equal force in a temple or in a closet; but not so to the spectators of the picture. By the former, nothing would have been seen but the bodiless hand, and the letters; but, by the latter, every thing will be deliberately examined; and every thing should therefore be made to sustain the mind, as much as possible, at its highest tone. The ruling sentiment of the present subject is a sublime and supernatural awe, and every part of the picture should, therefore, receive its character from that sentiment. Vastness and strength of architecture powerfully excite a sense of awe and grandeur; such an emotion, though differing in kind and in degree, is therefore in harmony with that ruling sentiment; and Mr. Martin has accordingly presented us with a hall of dimensions and gorgeous strength unparalleled. But when to the grand and the gigantic, we superadd some powerful moral association,-when we give to it the hoariness of antiquity,-when we deepen its solemnity by the obscurity of night,-when by concealing its limits, we lead the imagination to draw out the vast almost into the infinite,-then, indeed, do we awake to a

sense of awe and sublimity, beneath which the mind seems overpowered. How nobly has not the artist provided for this feeling by that tremendous tower, which, buried in clouds, and darkly visible under the flaring of the distant lightning, looks grimly over the roofless palace-hall, as if its impious builders had indeed made its top to reach unto the heaven! Every thing, in a word, combines to excite and sustain that emotion of sublime and supernatural awe, which is the ruling sentiment, the very soul of the subject.

We have heard it said that Mr. Martin has never copied a picture of any other master,-that he has never studied anatomy,-and that he has rarely, if ever, painted from the living figure. If these assertions be true, we do not know how he could satisfactorily clear himself from the charge of a negligence that must have been most injurious to him. The neglect of these two essential studies may amply account for two of his chief imperfections, the generally incorrect drawing of his figures, and the indifferent colouring of his flesh. Assuming that he is himself conscious of these two failings, it must appear surprising that the obvious cause should not have occurred to him, and that the remedy, as obvious, should not have been resorted to. He colours his flesh ill,-but, to colour well is not an instinct, -it is an art; and an art is never, in its perfection, the produce of a single mind, but the result of the accumulated labour and experience of many. He that avails himself of all that has been done by others before him, may hope, by the superaddition of something, to excel them all; but he that trusts to his own unaided genius for that which can be learned, in its most perfect state, only from the labours of others, places himself, to a certain degree, in the disadvantageous situation of the man who had to struggle against the difficulties of its first feeble beginning. Whatever the native powers of such a man may have been, he probably effected little, and was soon forgotten. The painter that would colour well, must not hope, by the force of his own genius, to leap at once to that height which has been attained only through the united and long-continued labour of all that have gone before him; but must diligently study the best patterns which they have left, and endeavour to add perfection to that which seems the most perfect. Nature alone must not be his study, for he does not make his man from the dust, and breathe into his nostrils the breath of life; his flesh is of another clay, and must be wrought after a different fashion. Nature must be his model, but Titian, and Vandyke, and Velasquez, must be his instructors. We cannot believe that it is even yet too late for Mr. Martin to resort to the living model, and the glowing canvass of his great predecessors, for improvement in his figures and in his colouring. The striking superiority, in these two particulars, of his last great picture over all his preceding works, justifies the belief that he might still-in the practical part, at least, of his art,-far surpass that which he has done the best; and encourages the hope that he will, with unrelaxing diligence, pursue every means which may conduce to farther excellence.

PART THIRD.

CHARACTERS OF EMINENT DIVINES-PHILOSOPHERS

STATESMEN-ORATORS-HISTORIANS-NOVELISTSCRITICS.

WARBURTON.*

WARBURTON, we think, was the last of our great divines-the last, perhaps, of any profession-who united profound learning with great powers of understanding, and, along with vast and varied stores of acquired knowledge, possessed energy of mind enough to wield them with ease and activity. The days of the Cudworths and Barrows-the Hookers and Taylors, are gone by. Among the other divisions of intellectual labour, to which the progress of society has given birth, the business of reasoning, and the business of collecting knowledge, have been, in a great measure, put into separate hands. Our scholars are now little else than pedants, and antiquaries, and grammarians,-who have never exercised any faculty but memory; and our reasoners are, for the most part, but slenderly provided with learning; or, at any rate, make but a slender use of it in their reasoning. Of the two, the reasoners are by far the best off; and, upon many subjects, have really profited by the separation. Argument from authority is, in general, the weakest and the most tedious of all arguments; and learning, we are inclined to believe, has more frequently played the part of a bully than of a fair auxiliary; and been oftener used to frighten people than to convince them,-to dazzle and overawe, rather than to guide and enlighten. A modern writer would not, if he could, reason as Barrow and Cudworth often reason; and every reader, even of Warburton, must have felt that his learning often encumbers rather than assists his progress, and, like shining armour, adds more to his terrors than to his strength. The true theory of this separation may be, therefore, that scholars who are capable of reasoning, have ceased to make a parade of their scholarship; while those who have nothing else, must continue to set it forward-just as gentlemen now-a-days keep their gold in their pockets, instead of wearing it on their clothes-while the fashion of laced suits still prevails among their domestics. There are individuals, however, who think that a man of rank looks most dignified in cut velvet and embroidery ; and that one who is not a gentleman can now counterfeit that appearance a little too easily. We do not presume to settle so weighty a dispute;— we only take the liberty of observing, that Warburton lived to see the fashion go out; and was almost the last native gentleman who appeared in a full trimmed coat.

He was not only the last of our reasoning scholars, but the last also, we think, of our powerful polemics. This breed too, we take it, is extinct;and we are not sorry for it. Those men cannot be much regretted, who, instead of applying their great and active faculties in making their fellows better or wiser, or in promoting mutual kindness and cordiality among all the virtuous and enlightened, wasted their days in wrangling upon idle theories, and in applying, to the speculative errors of their equals in talents and in virtue, those terms of angry reprobation which should be reserved for vice and malignity. In neither of these characters, therefore, can we seriously lament that Warburton is not likely to have any successor.

The truth is, that this extraordinary person was a Giant in literature— with many of the vices of the Gigantic character. Strong as he was, his excessive pride and overweening vanity were perpetually engaging him in enterprises which he could not accomplish; while such was his intolerable arrogance towards his opponents, and his insolence towards those whom he reckoned as his inferiors, that he made himself very generally and deservedly odious, and ended by doing considerable injury to the cause which he intended to support. The novelty and the boldness of his manner-the resentment of his antagonists-and the consternation of his friends, insured him a considerable share of public attention at the beginning; but such was the repulsion of his moral qualities as a writer, and the fundamental unsoundness of most of his speculations, that he no sooner ceased to write, than he ceased to be read or inquired after,—and lived to see those erudite volumes fairly laid on the shelf, which he fondly expected to carry down a growing fame to posterity.

The history of Warburton, indeed, is uncommonly curious, and his fate instructive. He was bred an attorney at Newark; and probably derived, from his early practice in that capacity, that love of controversy, and that habit of scurrility, for which he was afterwards distinguished. His first literary associates were some of the heroes of the Dunciad; and his first literary adventure the publication of some poems, which well entitled him to a place among those worthies. He helped pilfering Tibbalds' to some notes upon Shakspeare, and spoke contemptuously of Mr. Pope's talents, and severely of his morals, in his letters to Concannen. He then hired his pen to prepare a volume on the Jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery; and having now entered the church, made a more successful endeavour to magnify his profession, and to attract notice to himself, by the publication of his once famous book on the Alliance between Church and State,' in which all the presumption and ambition of his nature was first made manifest.

By this time he seems to have passed over from the party of the Dunces to that of Pope; and proclaimed his conversion pretty abruptly, by writing an elaborate defence of the Essay on Man, from some imputations which had been thrown on its theology and morality. Pope received the services of this voluntary champion with great gratitude; and Warburton having now discovered that he was not only a great poet, but a very honest man, continued to cultivate his friendship with great assiduity, and with very notable success; for Pope introduced him to Mr. Murray, who made him preacher at Lincoln's Inn, and to Mr. Allen of Prior-Park, who gave him his niece in marriage,-obtained a bishopric for him,-and left him his whole estate. In the mean time, he published his 'Divine Legation of Moses,'-the most learned, most arrogant, and most absurd work, which